The Rawsthorne Family Tree has recently moved to a new server located at http://www.ozfamily.horrorking.com. This family tree includes the Field, Morris, Lees, Collits, Strickland and Rawsthorne lines to name but a few. When I informed Dorothy (author of the Field Family Newsletter) that the site had moved, I felt it necessary to explain why.

Back in 1998 I began a website dedicated to the writings of Stephen King. This began as simply a few pages on my local ISP's site, and progressed to a very popular site aptly named Horrorking Com. My Local ISP hosted the website for a moderate fee, but in recent times they have noticed an increase in traffic, making it uneconomic for them to continue unless they charged substantially more. What was costing the money was an increase in traffic from 2GB a month, to close to 10GB a month, with peaks up to 15GB.

It was this decision that started me looking at hosting Horrorking somewhere else. If I was going to move the site, then I may as well incorporate other websites I run into the one place, and my family tree and photograph sites were an obvious choice.

The combined family tree and picture sites totalled over 130MB (That's 130 million bytes of information - about 92 floppy discs!), so I needed decent storage space as I was rapidly approaching the limit of the existing host. After a few months of searching, and trialling various hosting companies, I chose a new location, and signed up for a package that included 30GB a month in data, 1GB storage, and a number of subdomains, one of which is used for the family tree. The site attracts over 20,000 individual page views a month at the moment (But yet not one person has offered to sponsor the site with a donation of money or camera equipment - strange... Grin)

I have now combined the family tree and photographs into one site, and am currently working on a brand new design and feel for the site, as well as replacing and re-scanning many of the pictures currently on the site to improve the look of them. This will take time, so I hope people will bear with me as I do the upgrades. Also in the recent months there have been a number of requests to "Privatise" the site, and this has been done. Any living individual born after 1918, or married after 1945 has their date of birth and marriage automatically removed from the file (untill they pass away). This process is not foolproof, but seems to work well enough for most people.

Because the family tree trips to take photographs are done on a very low budget, I will continue to increase their numbers as time and money allow. Thanks to the work of Dorothy and her excellent newsletter, the site receives a good number of visitors, so it will continue to grow over time. Thank you to the many people that have offered accommodation in various places through NSW in the past as well, and I hope to travel through the Hunter Valley and further north in the next 6 months to take photographs in those areas. The next trip will be in a few weeks to the Sutherland area to do Woronora Cemetery, and considering the number of people I have there, it will be a very big trip!

The new website address, and hopefully permanent home of the family tree is: http://www.ozfamily.horrorking.com

Update: The Sutherland trip was done, followed by one to Coonamble, as was an update trip to Cowra (Via a few cemeteries on the way), and also a trip to Dubbo as well. I'm not sure where the next trip will be, but I expect it to be inland NSW, probably around Coonabarrabran and a little north from there.